Congress allocates World Championship tournaments

STOCKHOLM – The 2013 IIHF Annual Congress assigned 28 tournaments of the 2014 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship program. The tournaments will take place in 22 different countries.

The biggest tournament with the venue not previously known is the 2014 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship Division I Group A where the two teams promoted to the 2015 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship in the Prague and Ostrava, Czech Republic, will be determined.

Korea will host the tournament which also includes Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Japan and Ukraine in Seoul under the slogan “Beyond the New Horizons”.

“It is a great honour and pleasure for us. We want to host the 2014 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship Division I Group A since we are preparing for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games,” said Kim Sangwoo, Vice President of the Korea Ice Hockey Association.

“We want to make ice hockey a highlight of the Winter Games in PyeongChang. For this need experience in hosting ice hockey events at that level early on and we’re welcoming everybody in Korea next year.”

The proposed venue is the Mokdong Ice Rink. The arena offers an ice sheet of 61 x 30 metres and a second ice sheet, eight dressing rooms and a capacity for 6,000 fans.

Also the tier below, the 2014 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship Division I Group B, will go to a big venue. Lithuania considers to host the event at the Zalgiris Arena in Kaunas, the second-biggest city of the country. It’s the largest indoor arena in the Baltic countries built in 2011 for the European Basketball Championship and it’s constructed for ice making.

“Lithuania is very hungry for international competitions. It’s a newly built arena with 13,500 seats for ice hockey,” said Lithuanian delegate Petras Nauseda.

Some international events will also coincide with anniversaries like the 100-year anniversary of British ice hockey and Serbia’s 75-year anniversary.

For future events in Mexico a new ice rink Icedrom is currently under construction in the south of Mexico City. Opening at the end of June, it will offer 4,000 seats and seven dressing rooms.

Several national ice hockey associations expressed their interest for hosting the U18 World Championship between 2017 and 2019 with Slovakia (Kosice & Poprad), Russia (Chelyabinsk & Magnitogorsk) and Canada. The previous editions will be in Lappeenranta and Imatra, Finland, in 2014, in Switzerland in 2015 and in the United States in 2016.

In other news the membership status of the United Arab Emirates has been changed from associate member to full member.